Rahul Gandhi turns up heat on Amit Shah as Parliament showdown escalates

Being interrupted and shouted down by the Lok Sabha Speaker and Treasury Benches during his irreverent speeches in the House isn’t new to Rahul Gandhi. What Lok Sabha witnessed on Wednesday (July 29) as the Leader of Opposition rose to speak during the discussion on the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Amendment Bill 2026, was, however, unprecedented.

Rahul’s speech, a no-holds barred broadside at Union Home Minister Amit Shah, didn’t just provoke repeated interruptions by Speaker Om Birla and the Treasury Benches. It was abruptly cut short – first by repeated adjournments and then, in a first for any LoP, by the Speaker reportedly refusing to let Rahul finish his address unless he either apologised for his remarks at Shah or retracted them.

Rahul targets RSS influence

The uproar over Rahul’s speech, of course, had begun shortly after he rose to speak in the Lower House at 12.59 pm. That the Leader of Opposition meant to provoke an agitated response from the BJP MPs became clear shortly after. Rahul related a conversation with a girl student who told him there were three categories of people – “students…who respect the truth of all other human beings”, “idiots… who believe knowledge emerges from inside them and they are God” and “andh bhakts (blind followers)… who are convinced that another idiot is God”.

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While Rahul did not name anyone while citing these “three categories of people”, the Treasury Benches rose in deafening protest. It was not until Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh intervened and urged Birla to “expunge unparliamentary words” from the record and told his party MPs to listen to the LoP that some semblance of order was restored.

The quiet, however, didn’t last long as Rahul gradually began intensifying his tirade. He slammed Dharmendra Pradhan, who resigned as Union Education Minister last week following mounting student protests against examination paper leaks and the alleged police brutalities that were unleashed on agitating youth at and around Jantar Mantar on July 20.

“The resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan is a superficial thing. It is because Dharmendra Pradhan never ran the Education Ministry… the organisation that runs the Education Ministry is called the RSS and the man who runs it, is an OSD sitting in the minister’s office,” Rahul alleged and claimed that the RSS, the BJP’s parent organisation, had “captured the soul of the education system”.

Amit Shah under fire

The offensive did agitate some members from the Treasury Benches but with Rajnath Singh advising restraint, the BJP MPs complied. What came next, however, hit the ruling party where it hurts the most – a direct and unequivocal condemnation of the second most powerful man in the Union government after Narendra Modi; the Prime Minister’s closest lieutenant and Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

“I am very happy today to see that the so-called Home Minister of this country does not have the courage to come and sit here,” Rahul said, and before the House could erupt into full scale chaos, dealt the next punch – directly accusing Shah of authorising the police atrocities on students that the country witnessed for hours on July 20. “He put pellets into the blood of our students (sic). He ordered the students of India to be shocked,” Rahul alleged.

Unsurprisingly, what followed was an all-out slanging match between the Treasury and Opposition Benches, with Union Parliamentary Affairs minister Kiren Rijiju and Speaker Om Birla repeatedly telling Rahul to either apologise for making “unsubstantiated and baseless allegations” against Shah or retract his statements.

Rijiju dared Rahul to show any order from Shah that “authorised” the Delhi Police and the CRPF’s Rapid Action Force (RAF) to rain lathis, pellet guns, shock batons and tear gas on the July 20 protesters and added, “If you don’t apologise or retract, we will not let the House function”.

Rahul refuses to back down

The resulting uproar forced two consecutive adjournments. Congress sources said Rahul met Birla in the interregnum and requested that he be allowed to finish his speech. When the House reconvened at 3 pm, Birla asked Union minister Jitendra Singh, who had introduced the Public Examinations Bill in Lok Sabha on Tuesday, to respond to the discussion. It was evident Birla had rejected Rahul’s request and that the LoP too was in no mood to retract his allegations.

Also read | ‘Not just CRPF, Home Minister should also answer for brutalities on CJP protesters’

While the Bill was passed by a voice vote amid continuing protests by both Treasury and Opposition MPs and the Lok Sabha adjourned for the day shortly thereafter, it was clear Rahul wasn’t going to back down just yet. Moments later, the Congress party informed journalists that the LoP would address a press conference at 6 pm to finish the speech he wasn’t allowed to complete in Lok Sabha.

Clearly rattled, Union ministers and sundry BJP MPs rushed to launch a counter-offensive against Rahul. Jitendra Singh and Kiren Rijiju claimed “there was no firing” and so the “question of Shah authorising it doesn’t arise”, BJP veteran Ravi Shankar Prasad said Rahul had “misled the country once again with baseless claims”.

If the BJP hoped its robust pushback would deter Rahul from scaling up his tirade, they were grossly mistaken. At his press conference, not only did Rahul reiterate what he had already said in Lok Sabha but also went on to insinuate a way more serious charge. The Congress leader claimed that as the police began its atrocities on student agitators on July 20, he personally witnessed in the Parliament complex “Amit Shah calling the police”.

‘Either culpable or incompetent’

Rahul said in light of the police brutalities that the entire country witnessed and the protestors suffered on July 20, there were “only two possibilities”. Asserting that both the Delhi Police and the CRPF, to which the RAF reports, fall under the Union Home Ministry’s jurisdiction, Rahul said any order to use lethal force against protestors would have had to come directly from Shah, which, if true, “shows culpability”. Showing photographs of a protester riddled with pellet injuries, cops wielding shock batons and lathis embellished with iron nails and girl students being beaten by the police, Rahul said the other possibility was that the Home Minister was “unaware” of these brutalities, which he said, “shows his incompetence”.

“Either way, the Home Minister must be sacked. The Prime Minister must sack Amit Shah,” Rahul said. Responding to the BJP’s demands for an apology from him for making these allegations against Shah, Rahul asserted, “I will never apologise to the BJP-RSS.”

Also read | No justification for AK-47 on students, says ex-BSF officer

The Home Minister has, so far, maintained an uncharacteristic silence on Rahul’s charge and kept away from Lok Sabha on Wednesday. Sources in the government told The Federal that the BJP is in the process of instituting a complaint against Rahul with the Lok Sabha’s committee on privileges on grounds that his allegations are “without facts or basis” and made “purely with the intention of defaming Shah and inciting public anger against him”.

With Rahul going after Modi’s closest aide just days after the Prime Minister was forced by student agitators, the Opposition and rising public sentiment to accept Pradhan’s resignation, the gloves are now completely off between the Congress and the BJP. The storm that has hit Parliament’s Monsoon Session since it began on July 20 is expected to only get stronger.